


I Miss You, Even if You Don’t Know Me Anymore

by JustRinIsFine



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Benten is mentioned but not enough to tag him, Coming Out, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Juno Steel, Pre-Canon, probably not canon compliant but I tried, this is just me realizing that I might not be a woman and projecting onto Juno, unbetad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27225700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustRinIsFine/pseuds/JustRinIsFine
Summary: Juno never really thought about gender before. Subsequently, Juno never had the chance to come out as non-binary to his brother. But he comes out to Rita, and maybe that’s enough.(A vent fic about realizing your gender well after the death of a close sibling. I don’t know how relatable that is, but I felt like I needed to write it.)
Relationships: Rita & Juno Steel
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	I Miss You, Even if You Don’t Know Me Anymore

Juno Steel was 24 when he stumbled into the realization that he might not be a man. Not that he was under the impression he was a man before that, it’s just that, prior to that, there wasn’t the obligation to be one. He was a scrappy kid with more bark than bite and a bloody nose most days, and he was addressed as such. Even at the precinct, it was “rookie” or “hey you”, “Captain” for less than 24 hours, but never “sir”. Even though he was a proper man, _should be_ a proper man, something about it felt off to him. Not wrong, per say, but not… quite right. Almost right.

It wasn’t anything he ever talked about. It just wasn’t a conversation people had, there wasn’t any reason to. Most of Mars wasn’t in the position to be picky about anyone’s pronouns, least of all some backwater nobody from Hyperion City.

Benten had his own relationship with gender: nothing distinct, but there were late night conversations, when Juno and Benten shared a room, voices muffled to keep Sarah from waking up from where she was passed out on the couch. Benten lamented, in that old-soul way he did, about how free it felt to just let go of labels sometimes. He always had a smile to him when he talked about it, the same way he talked about dancing, content enough to leave it at that ineffable feeling that’s unable to be put into words. Juno wondered, sometimes, if he should have used other pronouns, referred to him as his sibling instead of brother, just once. He wonders if, somehow, that would have changed things. It wouldn’t have, he knows, but this way he can feel guilty about it.

So that’s what he feels guilty about, for a long time, long after the initial guilt of _I should have been there_ had passed, and the later guilt of _It should have been me_ had passed, was the passive but oppressive guilt of _I should have known him better_ , because only after you have your better half ripped away do you see how much you don’t know of them in the frayed pieces they leave behind at your seams.

It’s hard, sometimes to tell which of those scraps are theirs, and which are your own, so perhaps that’s why it took Juno so long to come to terms with the fact that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t a man.

It was a dream he had. He didn’t dream of Benten often, not anymore, that was one of his sorrows he worked damn hard to drown. But, nonetheless, he dreamed of Benten.

It was foggy when he woke up, one of those dreams you can only remember in the abstract. Darkness. His old bedroom. A ticking clock. Gunshot. Static. Screaming. Silence. The only clear memory of the dream was the soft, chiming voice of his brother, a chuckled, “You know, a lady like you should know better.”

Juno always sulked after a bad nightmare, and this nightmare was no different, gender crisis notwithstanding, so Juno sulked the rest of the day, because _oh boy,_ he was not ready to unpack that one. Nope, nuh-uh, he was burying that thought as far down _him_ self as he was metaphorically able to, and not thinking about it for as long as possible.

As long as possible, as it turns out, was a little less than a week from then, where Juno lounged on his office’s sofa, a glass of scotch in hand, and Rita listening to a stream in the other room. He brought the glass to his lips, taking a slow sip of the amber liquid. It wasn’t a good whiskey, and it went down like diesel, but it was what he had. Looking at the swirling glass, he reflected.

When moping in introspection got him no closer to a resolution, Juno groaned, irritated. “Hey, Rita. Got a minute?”

The low mumble of the stream from the other room grew silent, and within moments, Rita’s tiny frame poked it’s way into the doorway, “What’s up, boss?”

“Do I… seem manly to you?” He asked, cringing as he said it. It wasn’t a graceful start to the conversation, by any means, but it was a start.

Rita hummed thoughtfully, “I dunno, boss, you’re real gruff, and you shoot a lot of things, which all the manly-men on the streams do, and sometimes you don’t shave for a while, so you get that scruffy look that people say is real masculine,” she crinkled her nose, giving Juno a glance over, “But… no, I don’t think so.”

Juno sputtered, “Wait, what? Why? You just said, like, all that stuff,” Did Juno want to be manly? No, not really. Was that the answer he expected from Rita? Yeah, about. Was he going to be indignant about it anyways? Yes, apparently.

Rita, for her part, just shrugged. “Listen, you like a lot of manly things, but that doesn’t make that who you are. Plus, you also like eyeliner and skirts and stuff, which can also be very manly, don’t get me wrong, but… You’re just you, boss.”

It left Juno feeling off, the same off kilter feeling that he had felt since the first time someone offhandedly called him ‘sir’, the same feeling he had brushed off for the past five years of his life since Benten passed away. He thought, maybe, just maybe, if he was going to have one of those nebulous relations with gender, he should at least tell someone.

“Uh, Rita? I… I think… I might not be a man,” Juno pointedly looked at his glass, and not at Rita, though if he had been looking, he would have seen the soft, patient smile that crossed her face.

“Okay,” she said.

Juno whipped his head up and, Oh, there was that patient smile he had half been dreading and half been hoping for. “Okay? Just ‘okay’? What do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“Exactly that, boss. Okay, you don’t feel like a man. Do you feel like a woman?”

Juno cringed, “Eh… no, not really.”

“What about when I call you Mista Steel?” Rita had made her way across the room, settling gently on the couch across from Juno, who had pulled his knees up to his chest.

“I, sure, I guess. It’s fine,” He started, but at Rita’s unimpressed expression, he amended, “I don’t mind it. It’s… nice.”

“Okay, how’s about you tell me some ideas for what you’d like to be called.”

That made Juno’s mind blank. What did he want to be called? ‘Mister’ worked most days, it was fine, but he never felt like a man. Woman was too specific, too far the other direction. He took a breath, “Well, um, I like he/him pronouns.”

“Okay. What about they/them?”

He paused again. It wasn’t something he considered. He had been called ‘they’ a few times, mostly by people asking after him who had only ever seen his name, but it wasn’t a bad experience, and he never felt the need to correct people on it. “Maybe,” he said, eventually, “I’d have to hear it in practice, I think. Maybe. I don’t know, Rita,” Juno had never quite felt this out of his depth before, and it was starting to feel heavy on his shoulders.

Rita, though, simply brightened her smile, giving him an encouraging nod, “It’s okay, boss, you don’t gotta know all this stuff off the bat, you know. It takes time, sometimes, to get all your thoughts together. And maybe you’ll think something’s right, but change your mind, and maybe something will come up that you’ve never thought of before, and it’ll just click for you, but no matter what, I’ll be here for you, alright? Just say the word.”

Juno looked at her, all the positivity and gumption she put into that tiny body of hers, just pouring out in the affection she showed to others. He thought, then, about how Benten used to have that same optimism, that same overwhelming goodness about him, and he wondered, not for the first time, they were a magnetic force of kindness that attracted to his force of bitter regret.

 _“You know, a lady like you should know better,”_ his mind replayed, unhelpfully.

“I might be a lady, I think,” the words tumbled out, clumsy and raw, because Juno didn’t talk about his dreams, didn’t talk about _Benten_ but, god, he was going to try to get just this one thing out in the open. It wasn’t even about his brother, not really, but he clung to the idea of gender being Benten’s thing so tightly that, maybe, the two are so intrinsically mixed that they’ll never be separate.

Rita continued her unending support, undeterred, “Mista Lady Steel it is then,” She paused, brows furrowing, smile dropping from her face “Oh, boss… you’re crying”

And, shit, he was crying, wasn’t he. Silent tears streamed down his face, stinging at his flushed cheeks. He roughly swiped at them with his sleeve, cursing under his breath, “Fuck, sorry. Don’t know what’s come over me.”

Rita looked unconvinced, “You’re not going to get away with that this time, we’re in the middle of a moment, here.”

Juno huffed a laugh, short and wet, “It’s just,” he took a moment to collect himself, “Benten… we never had this conversation. And I know he… he wasn’t anything like me, when we really got down to it, but… I know he didn’t see himself as… you know?” It was so hard to talk to someone about those late-night gender conversations when they were so effortlessly nonspecific before. How were you supposed to put into words what someone so intently never spoke?

Rita just waited as he collected his thoughts, though, and eventually Juno continued, “And, like, he’ll never know me as… non-binary, or whatever,” using that word felt so right, but it made his heart hurt in ways he didn’t expect, “and I just… I’m afraid I won’t be the same person… if I ever see him again, at the end of this all. I’m afraid he won’t recognize who I’ve become. I’m scared I won’t recognize him, either.”

A heavy silence fell over them, but Rita was warm and comforting like a glass of cocoa, and eventually she said, “I don’t think you gotta worry about changing too bad, because we all change, and I’m sure that, if you ever do meet again, he’ll accept everything about you. I didn’t know him, but I don’t think that he would think badly of you for not knowing things about yourself, in the past. I mean, I doubt he knew everything about himself, either. And whenever it is that you do talk again, it’ll just be a new way to talk to each other,” she wiped at his check, pulling away his tears with her hands and her words, “Different isn’t always a bad thing, yeah?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Rita,” Juno said, and the words carried a thousand more he wanted to say. _I don’t deserve you_ and _I don’t know how you can always find the right words_ and _you would have loved him, you know._ But for tonight, they were enough.

And Rita, lovely, patient Rita, just nodded in her no-nonsense way that she did when she committed something to memory, and then, as casually as anything, she said “Okay, as great as it is talking to you, Mista Steel, us ladies should be getting home soon, huh? It’s pretty late, and we have that meeting with the client whose case we just closed up tomorrow, alright?”

And Juno couldn’t help the way his heart clenched with the overwhelming _rightness_ of being called both ‘mister’ and ‘lady’ in the same breath, so he just nodded and Rita plodded her way out into the next room, rambling about details of the case that she knows he isn’t listening to.

He missed Benten, more than anything most days, but if he ever turned up in the same afterlife as his brother, he’s going to have some stories to tell him, and maybe some of them will start with, “You know, a lady like me should have known better.” Maybe, just maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a way to vent about how there are things about me my late sister will never know, and vice versa, but along the way it turned into a vaguely-fluffy coming out fic. Can you tell I’m not out of the closet, and am still figuring out my shit? Because, oh boy, I am.
> 
> Every comment adds 5 years to my lifespan, and kudos make my heart happy. 
> 
> Please be gentle, this is pretty soul-exposing for me. To everyone figuring out their own shit, it’s okay to take your time, we’ll all get there someday <3


End file.
